Norman Rockwell’s Ode to Civil Discourse

This iconic painting, from his Four Freedoms series, honors respect for speakers of all stripes.

By

Bob Greene

Feb. 10, 2017 2:38 p.m. ET

Beneath the gray roof of an unassuming white building on Route 183 in Stockbridge, Mass., resides a certain painting. Its artist created it 75 years ago. Yet amid the strident shouts, random rudeness and ceaseless cacophony of our current-day United States, that painting, in the quiet within those walls, offers a lesson that can seem as urgent as a breaking-news bulletin.

The name of the painting is “Freedom of Speech.” The artist, Norman Rockwell, got the idea for it after listening to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s State of the Union address in 1941. In that speech Roosevelt spoke of “four essential human freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, freedom from fear.

Rockwell poured his heart into creating his Four Freedoms paintings. He offered them to the U.S. government, in the hopes they would be helpful in raising spirits during World War II. The government turned him down flat. But when, early in 1943, the Saturday Evening Post—at the time America’s largest-circulation magazine—published reproductions of the paintings in four consecutive issues, the nation’s response was so emotional and so overwhelming that the government did an about-face, asked permission to put the originals on tour, and used them to sell more than $132 million in war bonds.

Of the four paintings, “Freedom of Speech” has long been my favorite. And there is a good chance that if Rockwell, who died in 1978, were alive today, it would not even occur to him to make it look the way it does.

If you’ve ever seen the painting, you know what I mean. The setting is a town meeting. One man, in work clothes, has risen from the audience to speak. There is nervousness, and courage, in his eyes; Rockwell makes it evident that the man is likely not accustomed to talking in public. Other citizens of the town, the men in coats and ties, are in the seats around him. Their eyes are focused upward, toward him. They are hearing him out; they are patiently letting him have his say.

His eyes, their eyes…that is the power of the painting. We, of course, have no idea what is on the man’s mind, or whether the other townspeople agree with him or adamantly oppose him. But as he talks they are listening, giving him a chance. They know that their own turn, if they want it, will come. For now, they owe him their full and polite attention.

Such a simple concept. And it’s one that sometimes seems to be disappearing in this era when angry words hurtle past each other like poison-tipped arrows. Today, when so much public discourse is not just brutal but also faceless, when the back-and-forth is increasingly digitally driven, with invective and mockery flying from screen to screen, dispatched by people with made-up names, there is a constant impulse to shout down, to belittle, to gang up on. A gentle voice has scant chance in the rising din. You look at the Rockwell painting, and you ask yourself if that man could expect to find a respectful hearing in our electronic versions of group colloquy.

You contemplate the tableau in “Freedom of Speech,” and the meaning of those eyes hits you. Rockwell understood: Only when we look each other in the eye can we begin to solve our problems. It is easy to eviscerate someone whose eyes yours have never met; it is easy to harangue someone, to make him feel insignificant, if you don’t have to see him. When Rockwell was distilling America’s aspirations into his Four Freedoms paintings, there was no internet, there were no social media, television sets had not yet taken over the country’s homes. He took it on faith that when men and women rose to speak, they would of necessity greet each others’ gazes.

If you ever pass through Stockbridge, you can see the original Four Freedoms paintings in the Norman Rockwell Museum, the white building on Route 183. (The museum has just announced a traveling exhibition of the works scheduled to begin in 2018.) That man standing up in “Freedom of Speech”—what would be his fate today, in a world where the town meeting is not limited to any single town, where the meeting never stops, never sleeps, where the attendees are routinely invisible and full of casual rage? Would the man be granted a courteous hearing? Or, depending on the point he was hoping to make, would he be hooted down, hounded and laughed at by an audience he couldn’t see? Would he be silenced by strangers?

In the painting there is reverence in all those eyes. Not because of what the man is saying, but because of the sanctity of the act of saying it. It is reverence for an ideal that feels endangered today when, too often, the only eyes people see during their public debates are the ones reflecting off their computer screens as they type: their own two eyes, staring back.

—Mr. Greene is completing a new novel, “Yesterday Came Suddenly,” about a United States with no internet.

Six Technologies That Hit Their Tipping Points in 2015

To the average person, it may seem that the biggest technology advances of 2015 were the larger smartphone screens and small app updates. But a lot more happened than that. A broad range of technologies reached a tipping point, from cool science projects or objects of convenience for the rich, to inventions that will transform humanity. We haven’t seen anything of this magnitude since the invention of the printing press in the 1400s. Here are the six:

1. The Internet and knowledge

In the developed world, we have become used to having devices that connect and inform us and provide services on demand, and the developing world has largely been in the dark. As of 2015, however, nearly half of China’s population and a fifth of India’s population have gained Internet connectivity. India now has more Internet users than does the U.S., and China has twice as many.

Smartphones with the capabilities of today’s iPhone will cost less than $50 by 2020. By then, the efforts of Facebook, Google, OneWeb, and SpaceX to blanket the Earth with inexpensive Internet access through drones, balloons, and microsatellites will surely bear fruit. This means that we will see another three billion people come on line. Never before has all of humanity been connected in this way.

This will be particularly transformative for the developing world. Knowledge has always been a privilege of the rich; tyrants rule by keeping their populations ignorant. Soon, everyone, everywhere, will have access to the ocean of knowledge on the Internet. They will be able to learn about scientific advances as they happen. Social media will enable billions of people to share their experiences and help one another. Workers in the remotest villages of Africa will be able to offer digital services to the elite in Silicon Valley. Farmers will be able learn how to improve crop yields; artisans will gain access to global markets; and economies based on smartphone apps will flourish everywhere.

2. Doctors in our pockets

All of this has been made possible by advances in computing and networks. In a progression called Moore’s Law, computers continually get faster, cheaper, and smaller, doubling in speed every 18 months. Our $100 smartphones are more powerful than the supercomputers of the 1970s—which cost millions of dollars. With faster computers, it becomes possible to design more powerful sensors and artificial-intelligence (A.I.) systems. With better sensors, we can develop sophisticated medical devices, drone-based delivery systems, and smart cities; and, with A.I., we can develop self-driving cars, voice-recognition systems, and digital doctors. Yes, I am talking about applications that can diagnose our medical condition and prescribe remedies.

In 2015, smartphone-connected medical devices came into the mainstream. Most notably, Apple released a watch that, using a heart-rate sensor and accelerometer, can keep track of vital signs, activity, and lifestyles. Through its free Research Kit app, Apple provided the ability to monitor, on a global scale, the use of medicines and their efficacy. Microsoft, IBM, Samsung, and Google too, as well as a host of startups, are developing sensors and A.I.-based tools to do the work of doctors. These technologies are expensive and geared for the developed world; but companies in China, India, and Africa are working on inexpensive versions. The sensors that these devices use, and the computing and storage that A.I. systems need cost very little. Previous generations of medical advances were for the rich; now all can benefit.

3. Bitcoin and disintermediation

One of the most controversial technology advances of late is Bitcoin, an unregulated and uncontrolled digital currency. It gained notoriety for its use by criminals and hackers and the fall of its price from a peak of about $1100 to $250. Yet, in 2015, it gained acceptance by retailers such as Overstock.com. And the technology that underlies it, blockchain, became the basis of hundreds of technology-development efforts.

The blockchain is not useful just for finance. It is an almost incorruptible digital ledger that can be used to record practically anything that can be digitized: birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, deeds and titles of ownership, educational degrees, medical records, contracts, and votes. It has the potential to transform the lives of billions of people who lack bank accounts and access to the legal and administrative infrastructure that we take for granted.

4. Engineering of life

Another technology that came into the mainstream was CRISPR gene modification. Discovered by scientists only a few years ago, CRISPRs are elements of an ancient system that protects bacteria and other single-celled organisms from viruses, acquiring immunity to them by incorporating genetic elements from the virus invaders. Via CRISPRs, DNA can be edited, either removing unwanted sequences or inserting payload sequences, the genetic and chemical components necessary costing as little as $100.

CRISPR modification introduces many new risks if used wrongly—to edit human embryos, for example. But it could also be used to correct faulty DNA that’s responsible for genetic diseases such as cystic fibrosis, sickle-cell anemia, and Alzheimer’s, and to edit the genes of plants to produce more-nutritious food and require less water. Labs all over the world are working with this technology to solve a wide range of problems, and we will see breakthroughs.

5. The drone age

It is estimated that Americans will have purchased nearly half a million drones during this holiday season. With the cost of these flying machines falling to less than $100, the drone age has officially begun. We will see them everywhere. As the technologies advance, these will carry increasing amounts of weight and travel over longer distances. You can expect Amazon and Walmart to deliver your groceries and Starbucks to bring you your morning latte via drone. And they will monitor traffic and crime, perform building inspections, and provide emergency assistance in disasters.

These are an even bigger deal for the developing world. Large sections of Africa don’t have roads; remote towns and villages can’t get medical supplies; and large cities are clogged with traffic—much of it for delivery of small goods. Drones will solve many of these infrastructure problems and reduce pollution and traffic. They will also allow the constant monitoring of the Earth’s changing climate and wildlife ecology.

6. Saving the planet with unlimited clean energy

The biggest geopolitical breakthrough in clean energy in 2015 wasn’t the climate agreement in Paris, between 196 countries, to reduce the emissions of carbon dioxide. It was the deal that U.S. lawmakers struck to extend tax credits for solar and wind capture for another five years. The good intentions of nations will only take us so far; the U.S. deal will accelerate the progress of clean energy worldwide.

Solar and wind capture are already advancing on exponential curves, installation rates regularly doubling and costs falling. Even without the subsidies, the costs of U.S. solar installations could be halved by 2022, reducing the returns on investments in homes to less than four years. By, 2030, solar capture could provide 100 percent of today’s energy; by 2035, it could be free—just as cell-phone calls are today.

The tax credits for renewable energy generation will accelerate and ensure progress. Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates that the extension will add an extra 20 gigawatts of solar power—more than every panel ever installed in the U.S. prior to 2015. “The US was already one of the world’s biggest clean-energy investors. This deal is like adding another America of solar power into the mix,” Bloomberg said.

We are also seeing similar advances in battery storage. Combined with the advances in energy, large swaths of the planet that don’t presently have electricity have the potential to light up in the early 2020s. Having unlimited, clean energy will be transformative for the developing world—and the planet.

So we have a lot to be cheerful about and a lot to look forward to during the years ahead, as technology makes its major leaps forward. We just have to be careful to use it for bettering mankind rather than for holding it back—because there are as many risks as opportunities.

‘Serial’ Podcast Catches Fire

In the sleepy world of podcasts, ‘Serial’ has emerged as a global phenomenon

Sarah Koenig and producer Dana Chivvis in the studio. Elise Bergerson

By

Ellen Gamerman

Nov. 13, 2014 6:37 p.m. ET

A 15-year-old murder case is now riveting the nation.

The attention doesn’t come courtesy of a new TV series or movie, or anything involving a screen, for that matter, but a free podcast called “Serial,” a nonfiction story from the producers of “This American Life” that unspools week by week over the earphones of an unusually broad and fervent audience.

The show, which reopens the investigation into the 1999 strangling death of a Baltimore high-school student and her former 17-year-old boyfriend now serving a life sentence for the crime, has sparked a following straight out of the golden age of radio. It also has managed a rare trick in a noisy news and entertainment landscape driven by a lights-camera-action mind-set: It gets people to drop everything and just listen. New episodes are made available every Thursday at 6 a.m. Eastern time. This week, hundreds of thousands of listeners eagerly tuned in to hear episode 8 out of a likely 12.

Adnan Syed, who was convicted of the murder. Courtesy of Serial

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In the normally low-profile world of podcasting, “Serial” is a certified sensation—a testament to the power of great storytelling. It’s quickly become the most popular podcast in the world, according to Apple, and the fastest to reach 5 million downloads and streams in iTunes history. “Serial” is the top podcast in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia, and in the top 10 in Germany, South Africa and India.

Jason Reitman, a filmmaker whose credits include “Up in the Air,” is so obsessed, he taught himself the show’s disquieting piano score while biding time between installments. “I look forward to every Thursday in a way that I don’t remember awaiting the release of an episode of anything recently,” he said. “There’s something very intimate about someone telling you a story that close to your ears.”

A bulletin board at Lakes Community High School. Emily Cody

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The episodes explore whether an honor-roll student and onetime junior-prom prince named Adnan Syed was wrongly convicted of the murder of Hae Min Lee, his popular former girlfriend at Woodlawn High School in Baltimore County. The show’s co-creator and narrator, Sarah Koenig, spent a year examining the holes in the case against Mr. Syed. The suspense is as much driven by the story as it is by Ms. Koenig’s shifting convictions over Mr. Syed’s guilt or innocence.

“Serial” is downloaded an average 1.26 million times per episode, sending fans into debates over the finer points of the evidence. People can hear the podcast, which is like a radio show but entirely on the Internet, either by streaming it from the “Serial” website or downloading it onto a phone, tablet or computer from a platform like iTunes.

The show has seized the popular imagination and developed an unusually intense following. High-school English teachers have abandoned their normal lesson plans and are having their classes follow along. Visitors to the social-media and entertainment website Reddit are attempting to investigate the crime on their own, sorting through court documents, retracing the footsteps of the suspects, sometimes even trying to track down key players who testified in court. People are listening to a podcast about the podcast—there’s one by Slate—while switching allegiances over the true identity of the killer.

It’s struck a powerful chord with people in the entertainment industry, who have been busy promoting it on Twitter. “My favorite TV show is on the radio,” wrote Danny Zuker, a writer and producer known for the TV series “Modern Family.” From actor Adam Scott of “Parks and Recreation”: “@serial has taken over my life.” Actor and comedian Patton Oswalt posted a picture of a “listening party”—people sitting around an open laptop, staring into space. After “Black Swan” director Darren Aronofsky praised the show, someone tweeted at him: “Totally agree! Make a movie of it.”

Hollywood executives already have contacted agents for “This American Life” with ideas for TV or movie projects around “Serial” (so far the show is not pursuing any). The success story could spur the entertainment industry to take a closer look at podcasts as a source of material. “Hollywood tends to chase what’s popular, and ‘Serial’ certainly is,” said Beau Willimon, creator of “House of Cards,” who wrote a 4,000-plus word, two-part meditation on the show on Reddit. “It’s a vast and ripe medium.” (He insisted on total silence about the latest episode because he was busy filming “House of Cards” on Thursday morning and hadn’t yet heard it.)

The staff hopes to continue with a second season, also called “Serial.” The timing and subject of that story haven’t been determined, though “Serial” executive producer Julie Snyder said the next season probably wouldn’t focus on a crime. The program is largely funded by “This American Life,” with a main sponsor, the email-marketing service MailChimp. Ms. Snyder said the staff is still figuring out how to pay for next season, but the podcast would likely remain free.

“This American Life,” a program funded largely by listener donations, corporate sponsorships and fees paid by radio stations, is a production of Chicago Public Media/WBEZ Chicago, a nonprofit entity and the public-radio station in Chicago. “This American Life” devoted a revenue surplus from last year to help pay for “Serial.” The show was launched on a shoestring, with a small staff, some of whom pull double duty on “This American Life.”

Legal experts are riveted by “Serial.” Deirdre Enright, director of investigation at the Innocence Project Clinic at the University of Virginia School of Law, assigned a team of students to delve into the case. Since the podcast, Ms. Enright said that she has received hundreds of emails and “some very good tips on alternate suspects.” Used to working in relative obscurity, she called the attention “unexpected and overwhelming and startling.”

There is no indication whether a new trial will be opened. The state’s attorney’s office for Baltimore city declined to comment on the case.

The story has spurred on amateur crime solvers, including many who have flocked to Reddit. So far this month, more than 171,000 people have visited the site’s “Serial” area. People claiming to know Mr. Syed put up posts that have disparaged or defended him; strangers speculate about whether he could be a sociopath. Personal information about people whose full identities have been kept private in the story have emerged here, too, at least briefly. The site ran into trouble after the Boston Marathon bombing, when members wrongly singled out several people as possible suspects. In the “Serial” section, moderators vow to remove material like home addresses and Facebook links and remind posters that “these are real people with real lives.”

Rabia Chaudry, the lawyer who brought the story to Ms. Koenig. Rabia Chaudry

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Mr. Syed has apparently not listened to the series in prison in Maryland—he doesn’t have access to the Internet. But he has begun receiving a lot of letters from listeners, said Rabia Chaudry, a lawyer and friend of the Syed family who first alerted Ms. Koenig to the case. Ms. Chaudry is making a note of which parts of Mr. Syed’s story have troubled listeners the most—points that a lawyer should address head on if there is another trial. “This is like research—you know what the potential jury might be thinking,” she said.

At the heart of “Serial,” and what has fans binge listening to catch up with the series, is the narrator herself, Ms. Koenig. A gifted storyteller, she seductively dishes out clues and chases down dead ends. Listeners are swept up in her obsession and feel like they are part of a hunt for truth and justice alongside an entertaining and smart companion.

Each episode starts with the plinks of piano music and the detached voice of an automated operator connecting Mr. Syed’s phone call from prison to Ms. Koenig: “This is a Global Tel*Link prepaid call from—Adnan Syed—an inmate at a Maryland correctional facility.” Ms. Koenig’s storytelling style—part goofy best friend, part hipster Encyclopedia Brown—is filled with visuals. “He has giant brown eyes, like a dairy cow,” she says of her subject.

She is transparent about her shifting feelings and quick to admit failure: “We tried this drive, twice we tried, in fact, because, full disclosure, the first time we screwed it up.” She describes herself as a “moron” at one point. She offers whimsical asides in an office scene: “That’s a scanner, scanning its little scanner heart out.” She worries about coming up empty: “That’s my fear, is I’m gonna get through all this and just be like, ‘I dunno.’”

The Leakin Park crime scene in 1999. Courtesy of Serial

~

As they do with addictive TV, fans are already fretting that the last episode will be a letdown. “I feel like we’re pretty good at making sure it won’t be a giant disappointment,” Ms. Koenig said in an interview. “I’ll present what my reporting bears out, and that’s my responsibility. It’s not my responsibility to entertain you with some wonderful, perfect ending. I don’t mean that in a holier-than-thou way at all—it’s just—I’m a reporter.”

Others have suggested that Ms. Koenig has a secret ending that she’s pretending she doesn’t know—an idea she rejects. She has already completed most of her reporting, though she said that since “Serial” launched, people have come forward with new information. The show introduced its first two episodes in early October. Since then, the staff has completed each episode on deadline every week, a time pressure the producers imposed so that they could move on to other assignments. The series will likely conclude in mid-December (there is no episode on Thanksgiving).

Ms. Koenig, 45, is a veteran newspaper reporter who has worked for the last decade as a staff producer at “This American Life.” The popular public-radio show featuring narrative nonfiction stories is hosted and executive produced by Ira Glass, who serves as an editorial adviser on “Serial.”

High-school students, some the same age as the victim, are eagerly waiting to see what Ms. Koenig turns up next. Michael Godsey, an English teacher who usually makes his 11th-grade students read “Hamlet” this time of year, upended his lesson plans after “Serial.” Now roughly 150 students at Morro Bay High School on the central coast of California are listening to the show in class and doing assignments about it. At Lakes Community High School in suburban Chicago, seniors are studying the show for class, too. Some got so into it, they put up a police-style board for evidence with pictures and colored yarn threaded between suspects. “They wanted to CSI track it,” said their English teacher, Emily Cody.

The show has sparked the inevitable with any viral phenomenon: theme T-shirts, memes and spoofs.

“Everyone who listens to the podcast can feel like they’re active participants in it,” said Sal Gentile, a comedy writer who cocreated an online parody of “Serial” and posted it on YouTube. In it, two guys obsess over how obsessed they are with the series, to the point where they’re asking other people named Sarah Koenig what it’s like to be named Sarah Koenig. Mr. Gentile said he made the video after he and his friends got hooked on the show: “The degree to which our conversations were all-consuming about ‘Serial’ had reached absurd proportions.”

Corrections & Amplifications

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described “This American Life” as a nonprofit. The program is a production of Chicago Public Media/WBEZ Chicago, a nonprofit entity and the public-radio station in Chicago. (Nov. 19, 2014)

KeywordsThe Web Is Dying; Apps Are Killing It Tech’s Open Range Is Losing Out to Walled Gardens
By
Christopher Mims

Updated Nov. 17, 2014 2:53 p.m. ET

Phil Foster

The Web—that thin veneer of human-readable design on top of the machine babble that constitutes the Internet—is dying. And the way it’s dying has farther-reaching implications than almost anything else in technology today.

Think about your mobile phone. All those little chiclets on your screen are apps, not websites, and they work in ways that are fundamentally different from the way the Web does.

Mountains of data tell us that, in aggregate, we are spending time in apps that we once spent surfing the Web. We’re in love with apps, and they’ve taken over. On phones, 86% of our time is spent in apps, and just 14% is spent on the Web, according to mobile-analytics company Flurry.

This might seem like a trivial change. In the old days, we printed out directions from the website MapQuest that were often wrong or confusing. Today we call up Waze on our phones and are routed around traffic in real time. For those who remember the old way, this is a miracle.

Everything about apps feels like a win for users—they are faster and easier to use than what came before. But underneath all that convenience is something sinister: the end of the very openness that allowed Internet companies to grow into some of the most powerful or important companies of the 21st century.

Take that most essential of activities for e-commerce: accepting credit cards. When Amazon.com made its debut on the Web, it had to pay a few percentage points in transaction fees. But Apple takes 30% of every transaction conducted within an app sold through its app store, and “very few businesses in the world can withstand that haircut,” says Chris Dixon, a venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz.

App stores, which are shackled to particular operating systems and devices, are walled gardens where Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon get to set the rules. For a while, that meant Apple banned Bitcoin, an alternative currency that many technologists believe is the most revolutionary development on the Internet since the hyperlink. Apple regularly bans apps that offend its politics, taste, or compete with its own software and services.

But the problem with apps runs much deeper than the ways they can be controlled by centralized gatekeepers. The Web was invented by academics whose goal was sharing information. Tim Berners-Lee was just trying to make it easy for scientists to publish data they were putting together during construction of CERN, the world’s biggest particle accelerator.

No one involved knew they were giving birth to the biggest creator and destroyer of wealth anyone had ever seen. So, unlike with app stores, there was no drive to control the early Web. Standards bodies arose—like the United Nations, but for programming languages. Companies that would have liked to wipe each other off the map were forced, by the very nature of the Web, to come together and agree on revisions to the common language for Web pages.

The result: Anyone could put up a Web page or launch a new service, and anyone could access it. Google was born in a garage. Facebook was born in Mark Zuckerberg ’s dorm room.

But app stores don’t work like that. The lists of most-downloaded apps now drive consumer adoption of those apps. Search on app stores is broken.

On phones, 86% of our time is spent in apps, and just 14% is spent on the Web, according to mobile-analytics company Flurry. Bloomberg News

The Web is built of links, but apps don’t have a functional equivalent. Facebook and Google are trying to fix this by creating a standard called “deep linking,” but there are fundamental technical barriers to making apps behave like websites.

The Web was intended to expose information. It was so devoted to sharing above all else that it didn’t include any way to pay for things—something some of its early architects regret to this day, since it forced the Web to survive on advertising.

The Web wasn’t perfect, but it created a commons where people could exchange information and goods. It forced companies to build technology that was explicitly designed to be compatible with competitors’ technology. Microsoft’s Web browser had to faithfully render Apple’s website. If it didn’t, consumers would use another one, such as Firefox or Google’s Chrome, which has since taken over.

Today, as apps take over, the Web’s architects are abandoning it. Google’s newest experiment in email nirvana, called Inbox, is available for both Android and Apple’s iOS, but on the Web it doesn’t work in any browser except Chrome. The process of creating new Web standards has slowed to a crawl. Meanwhile, companies with app stores are devoted to making those stores better than—and entirely incompatible with—app stores built by competitors.

“In a lot of tech processes, as things decline a little bit, the way the world reacts is that it tends to accelerate that decline,” says Mr. Dixon. “If you go to any Internet startup or large company, they have large teams focused on creating very high quality native apps, and they tend to de-prioritize the mobile Web by comparison.”

Many industry watchers think this is just fine. Ben Thompson, an independent tech and mobile analyst, told me he sees the dominance of apps as the “natural state” for software.

Ruefully, I have to agree. The history of computing is companies trying to use their market power to shut out rivals, even when it’s bad for innovation and the consumer.

That doesn’t mean the Web will disappear. Facebook and Google still rely on it to furnish a stream of content that can be accessed from within their apps. But even the Web of documents and news items could go away. Facebook has announced plans to host publishers’ work within Facebook itself, leaving the Web nothing but a curiosity, a relic haunted by hobbyists.

I think the Web was a historical accident, an anomalous instance of a powerful new technology going almost directly from a publicly funded research lab to the public. It caught existing juggernauts like Microsoft flat-footed, and it led to the kind of disruption today’s most powerful tech companies would prefer to avoid.

It isn’t that today’s kings of the app world want to quash innovation, per se. It is that in the transition to a world in which services are delivered through apps, rather than the Web, we are graduating to a system that makes innovation, serendipity and experimentation that much harder for those who build things that rely on the Internet. And today, that is pretty much everyone.

—Follow Christopher Mims on Twitter @Mims; write to him at christopher.mims@wsj.com.

Read Slowly to Benefit Your Brain and Cut Stress

At Least 30 Minutes of Uninterrupted Reading With a Book or E-Book Helps

Members of a Wellington, New Zealand, club gather weekly to read slowly. Frida Sakaj

By

Jeanne Whalen

Updated Sept. 16, 2014 1:04 a.m. ET

Once a week, members of a Wellington, New Zealand, book club arrive at a cafe, grab a drink and shut off their cellphones. Then they sink into cozy chairs and read in silence for an hour.

The point of the club isn’t to talk about literature, but to get away from pinging electronic devices and read, uninterrupted. The group calls itself the Slow Reading Club, and it is at the forefront of a movement populated by frazzled book lovers who miss old-school reading.

Slow reading advocates seek a return to the focused reading habits of years gone by, before Google, smartphones and social media started fracturing our time and attention spans. Many of its advocates say they embraced the concept after realizing they couldn’t make it through a book anymore.

“I wasn’t reading fiction the way I used to,” said Meg Williams, a 31-year-old marketing manager for an annual arts festival who started the club. “I was really sad I’d lost the thing I used to really, really enjoy.”

Slow readers list numerous benefits to a regular reading habit, saying it improves their ability to concentrate, reduces stress levels and deepens their ability to think, listen and empathize. The movement echoes a resurgence in other old-fashioned, time-consuming pursuits that offset the ever-faster pace of life, such as cooking the “slow-food” way or knitting by hand.

The benefits of reading from an early age through late adulthood have been documented by researchers. A study of 300 elderly people published by the journal Neurology last year showed that regular engagement in mentally challenging activities, including reading, slowed rates of memory loss in participants’ later years.

A study published last year in Science showed that reading literary fiction helps people understand others’ mental states and beliefs, a crucial skill in building relationships. A piece of research published in Developmental Psychology in 1997 showed first-grade reading ability was closely linked to 11th grade academic achievements.

Yet reading habits have declined in recent years. In a survey this year, about 76% of Americans 18 and older said they read at least one book in the past year, down from 79% in 2011, according to the Pew Research Center.

Attempts to revive reading are cropping up in many places. Groups in Seattle, Brooklyn, Boston and Minneapolis have hosted so-called silent reading parties, with comfortable chairs, wine and classical music.

Diana La Counte of Orange County, Calif., set up what she called a virtual slow-reading group a few years ago, with members discussing the group’s book selection online, mostly on Facebook. “When I realized I read Twitter more than a book, I knew it was time for action,” she says.

Screens have changed our reading patterns from the linear, left-to-right sequence of years past to a wild skimming and skipping pattern as we hunt for important words and information.

One 2006 study of the eye movements of 232 people looking at Web pages found they read in an “F” pattern, scanning all the way across the top line of text but only halfway across the next few lines, eventually sliding their eyes down the left side of the page in a vertical movement toward the bottom.

None of this is good for our ability to comprehend deeply, scientists say. Reading text punctuated with links leads to weaker comprehension than reading plain text, several studies have shown. A 2007 study involving 100 people found that a multimedia presentation mixing words, sounds and moving pictures resulted in lower comprehension than reading plain text did.

Slow reading means a return to a continuous, linear pattern, in a quiet environment free of distractions. Advocates recommend setting aside at least 30 to 45 minutes in a comfortable chair far from cellphones and computers. Some suggest scheduling time like an exercise session. Many recommend taking occasional notes to deepen engagement with the text.

F. Martin Ramin/The Wall Street Journal

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Some hard-core proponents say printed books are best, in part because they’re more visible around the house and serve as a reminder to read. But most slow readers say e-readers and tablets are just fine, particularly if they’re disconnected from the Internet.

Abeer Hoque, who has attended a few of the silent reading parties in Brooklyn, N.Y., said she plans to read a book on her phone next time, but turn it to airplane mode to stop new emails and social-media notifications from distracting her.

When Ms. Williams, who majored in literature in college, convened her first slow reading club in Wellington, she handed out tips for productive reading and notebooks for jotting down favorite words and passages. Each time they meet, the group gathers for a few minutes to slowly breathe in and out to clear their minds before cracking open their books, as in yoga.

Roughly 20 to 30 readers have shown up for Sunday evening sessions, Ms. Williams says. Most new members fill out a brief survey on their experience with many describing it as calm, peaceful and meditative, she says.

Corrections & Amplifications

An earlier version of this article neglected to give the first name of Meg Williams. (Sept. 15, 2014)

“The Internet shows how creativity can flourish when government governs least. The Web allows permissionless innovation, where no one needs an operating license or other authorization. This doesn’t leave much of a role for multinational groups like the U.N., even if some governments are plotting otherwise.”

The U.N. Wants to Run the Internet

Authoritarian regimes want to prohibit anonymity on the Web, making it easier to find and arrest dissidents.

By L. GORDON CROVITZ

Here’s a wake-up call for the world’s two billion Web users, who take for granted the light regulation of the Internet: A group of 193 countries will meet in December to reregulate the Internet. Every country, including China, Russia and Iran, gets a vote. Can a majority of countries be trusted to keep their hands off the Web?

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a low-profile United Nations organization, is overseeing this yearlong review of the Web. Its process is so secretive that proposals by member countries are confidential. The Obama administration has yet to nominate a negotiator for the U.S. side, even though Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said last year that his goal was “international control over the Internet.”

Word of a few proposals has leaked out. Several authoritarian regimes want to prohibit people from being anonymous on the Web, which would make it easier to find and arrest dissidents.

Another proposal would replace Icann, the private domain system under contract to the U.S. Commerce Department, with a system run by the U.N. Yet another idea is a new fee, payable whenever users access the Web “internationally”—whatever that means for a global Web, especially as servers increasingly are in the cloud, nowhere and everywhere—which would restore payments governments lost when international telephone charges fell. This would undermine the seamless nature of the Web.

Getty Images

The ITU has long regulated long-distance fixed telephone calls and helps keep satellites in assigned orbits. But unlike phones and satellites, which need an international regulator to maintain order, the Web does not have fixed locations. Still, the ITU is the regulator of choice for countries aiming to control the Web.

“When an invention becomes used by billions across the world, it no longer remains the sole property of one nation, however powerful that nation might be,” Hamadoun Toure, secretary-general of the ITU, says in “World War 3.0,” an article in the May issue of Vanity Fair.

Mr. Toure, a native of Mali who was educated in Leningrad and Moscow during the Soviet era, adds: “There should be a mechanism where many countries have an opportunity to have a say. I think that’s democratic. Do you think that’s democratic?”

This argument against an open Web echoes the “new world information and communication order” movement of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union tried to legitimize censorship. Unesco was the U.N. agency used for these arguments, with the U.S. and Britain withdrawing from the U.N. agency in the 1980s.

“The idea of a conference among nation states to decide the future of the Internet is itself not in keeping with the spirit of the times,” Rebecca MacKinnon told me last week. Her recent book, “Consent of the Networked,” describes how important it’s been for the Internet to develop outside of multinational organizations, with technology companies, engineering associations and civil society groups having as much influence as governments. As Ms. MacKinnon notes, “this is especially true since a large percentage of governments do not reflect the consent of the governed.”

At a planning meeting last month on proposed regulations, Mr. Toure said that the agenda for the December meeting, which will be held in Dubai, would not include ITU “governance” of the Web. But he refused to have this reassurance written into the record, which is further evidence of a power grab.

In her book, Ms. MacKinnon, a former CNN bureau chief in Beijing, cites how in 2005 the U.N. had the bad judgment to choose Tunisia under President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali for a conference that China used to lobby for more U.N. power over the Internet. Tunisia was the first government overthrown during the Arab Spring. A follow-up U.N. meeting was held in 2009 in Egypt under Hosni Mubarak, also later removed from power.

“In the physical world, mechanisms of democratic politics and constitutional law have worked” to protect rights, Ms. MacKinnon wrote. “These mechanisms are no longer adequate for people whose physical lives now depend on what they can or cannot do (and what others can do to them) in the new digital spaces where sovereignty and power are ill-defined and highly contested.”

Her suggestion is that multinational organizations continue with limited power over the Internet, while the technologists who maintain the plumbing of the Web share authority with human rights and other stakeholder groups interested in keeping the Web open. Applying the political-science notion of a social contract to the Web for “consent of the networked” is a novel approach. It recognizes that the Web is global, with an inherent ideology in favor of more transparency and greater access to information.

The Internet shows how creativity can flourish when government governs least. The Web allows permissionless innovation, where no one needs an operating license or other authorization. This doesn’t leave much of a role for multinational groups like the U.N., even if some governments are plotting otherwise.

Google’s iPhone Tracking

Google Inc. and other advertising companies have been bypassing the privacy settings of millions of people using Apple Inc.’s Web browser on their iPhones and computers—tracking the Web-browsing habits of people who intended for that kind of monitoring to be blocked.

The companies used special computer code that tricks Apple’s Safari Web-browsing software into letting them monitor many users. Safari, the most widely used browser on mobile devices, is designed to block such tracking by default.

Google disabled its code after being contacted by The Wall Street Journal.

Tracking Leaves a Trail

The Google code was spotted by Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer and independently confirmed by a technical adviser to the Journal, Ashkan Soltani, who found that ads on 22 of the top 100 websites installed the Google tracking code on a test computer, and ads on 23 sites installed it on an iPhone browser.

The technique reaches far beyond those websites, however, because once the coding was activated, it could enable Google tracking across the vast majority of websites. Three other online-ad companies were found using similar techniques: Vibrant Media Inc., WPP PLC’s Media Innovation Group LLC and Gannett Co.’s PointRoll Inc.

In Google’s case, the findings appeared to contradict some of Google’s own instructions to Safari users on how to avoid tracking. Until recently, one Google site told Safari users they could rely on Safari’s privacy settings to prevent tracking by Google. Google removed that language from the site Tuesday night.

In a statement, Google said: “The Journal mischaracterizes what happened and why. We used known Safari functionality to provide features that signed-in Google users had enabled. It’s important to stress that these advertising cookies do not collect personal information.”

Google’s privacy practices are under intense scrutiny. Last year, as part of a far-reaching legal settlement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission the company pledged not to “misrepresent” its privacy practices to consumers. The fine for violating the agreement is $16,000 per violation, per day. The FTC declined to comment on the findings.

An Apple official said: “We are working to put a stop” to the circumvention of Safari privacy settings.

Of the ad companies found to be using the technique, Google has by far the largest reach. It delivers Internet ads that were viewed at least once by 93% of U.S. Web users in December, according to comScore Media Metrix.

A Vibrant Media spokesman called its use of the technique a “workaround” to “make Safari work like all the other browsers.” Other major Web browsers don’t block tracking by default. Vibrant, a top 25 ad network in the U.S. according to comScore Media Metrix, uses the technique “for unique user identification,” the spokesman said, but doesn’t collect personally identifiable information such as name or financial-account numbers.

WPP declined to comment. A spokeswoman for Gannett described its use of the code as part of a “limited test” to see how many Safari users visited advertisers’ sites after seeing an ad.

PointRoll’s coding was found in some ads on WSJ.com. “We were unaware this was happening on WSJ.com and are looking into it further,” a Journal spokeswoman said.

To test the prevalence of Google’s code, the Journal’s technology adviser, Mr. Soltani, surveyed the top 100 most popular websites as ranked by Quantcast earlier this month. He found Google placed the code within ads displayed on major sites including movie site Fandango.com, dating site Match.com, AOL.com, TMZ.com and UrbanDictionary.com, among others. These companies either declined to comment or didn’t respond. There is no indication that they or any other sites knew of the code.

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“We were not aware of this behavior,” said Michael Balmoris, AT&T Inc. spokesman. Google’s code was found on AT&T’s YellowPages.com. “We would never condone it,” he said.

Google has already been facing broader questions about privacy. Last month, Google—which offers many services including YouTube, Gmail and of course, Google search—said it would revise its privacy policy to combine nearly all the information it possesses about its users.

The move prompted an international outcry. European Union privacy officials asked Google to “pause” its changes until it can ensure the privacy of EU citizens. Google said it briefed European officials in the weeks before its announcement and plans to roll out the new privacy policy March 1.

Across the digital landscape, the issue of online privacy is taking center stage. In recent months, large institutions and tiny app-makers alike have been accused of mishandling personal data. Trying to reassure a worried public, lawmakers have introduced more than a dozen privacy bills in Congress. The Obama administration has called for a Privacy Bill of Rights to encourage companies to adopt better privacy practices.

Trade in personal data has emerged as a driver of the digital economy. Many tech companies offer products for free and get income from online ads that are customized using data about customers. These companies compete for ads, in part, based on the quality of the information they possess about users.

Google’s tracking of Safari users traces its roots to Google’s competition with social-network giant Facebook Inc. After Facebook launched its “Like” button—which gives people an easy way to indicate they like various things online—Google followed with a “+1” button offering similar functionality on its rival social network, known as Google+.

Last year, Google added a feature to put the +1 button in ads placed across the Web using Google’s DoubleClick ad technology. The idea: If people like the ad, they could click “+1” and post their approval to their Google social-networking profile.

But Google faced a problem: Safari blocks most tracking by default. So Google couldn’t use the most common technique—installation of a small file known as a “cookie”—to check if Safari users were logged in to Google.

To get around Safari’s default blocking, Google exploited a loophole in the browser’s privacy settings. While Safari does block most tracking, it makes an exception for websites with which a person interacts in some way—for instance, by filling out a form. So Google added coding to some of its ads that made Safari think that a person was submitting an invisible form to Google. Safari would then let Google install a cookie on the phone or computer.

The cookie that Google installed on the computer was temporary; it expired in 12 to 24 hours. But it could sometimes result in extensive tracking of Safari users. This is because of a technical quirk in Safari that allows companies to easily add more cookies to a user’s computer once the company has installed at least one cookie.

Google said it tried to design the +1 advertising system to protect people’s privacy and that the placement of further tracking cookies on Safari browsers wasn’t anticipated.

Among some Web programmers, the type of maneuver used by Google appears to have been an open secret for some time. Anant Garg, a 25-year-old Web developer in Mumbai, India, blogged about the technique two years ago.

Mr. Garg said when he developed the Safari workaround he didn’t consider the privacy angle. He came up with the idea simply to “ensure a consistent experience” for a group of people accessing a chat system from different Web browsers, he said.

The coding also has a role in some Facebook games and “apps”—particularly if the app wants to store a user’s login information or game scores. In fact, a corporate Facebook page for app developers called “Best Practices” includes a link to Mr. Garg’s blog post.

“We work to educate our developers on how to deliver a consistent user experience across all browsers,” said Facebook spokesman David Swain.

Mr. Mayer, who spotted Google using the code, also noticed variations of Mr. Garg’s code at work in ads placed by Vibrant Media and WPP’s Media Innovation Group. Mr. Soltani verified those findings, and also found code being used by Gannett’s PointRoll. In a test, Mr. Soltani found the PointRoll code present in ads on 10 of the top 100 U.S. sites.

This is a book review from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal which focuses at the heart of the online-freedom issue. Who has a right to tell us what we can blog, when we can blog or if we can blog at all? The government? The private owners of corporate giants such as Facebook or Apple? Do we have a right to blog free of any censorship, fears or threats? Did the Egyptian government, in January 2011, have the right to order internet providers to “pull the plug” on net communications for five days? Do Facebook and Google have the right to sell for profit our personal and private information, as they now do, for use by advertisers, law enforcement and artificial-intelligence techs who need the info for human behavioral studies? These are questions that can and should be asked.

I’ve interspersed my own comments (bracketed and in italics) between the article’s paragraphs. —SB

Handmaidens to Censorship:

The threat to online freedom may come from governments, of course, but also from private companies doing the state’s dirty work. Luke Allnutt reviews “Consent of the Networked.”

With mounting street protests calling for the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian government, in January 2011, decided to pull the plug on the Internet and mobile telecommunications *. It wasn’t difficult. The authorities reportedly asked the country’s Internet providers, including a joint venture with the U.K.-based Vodafone, to turn off their services. If the companies didn’t want to break Egyptian law, they had no choice but to comply. For five days, the Egyptian Internet was virtually blacked out.

[*Here, there was implicit governmental intimidation to shut down freedom of speech. There has been much talk since the Egyptian riots of the power that technology now wields toward allowing instantaneous organizing of dissenters. Who should own that power to cut off free speech to both consenters and dissenters alike? —SB]

In “Consent of the Networked,” Rebecca MacKinnon, a fellow at the New America Foundation, argues that it is governments working in collaboration with corporations that represent the greatest threat to Internet freedom. Internet control, she makes clear, is about more than censorship and filtering. It is also about shaping narratives and getting private companies to do the state’s dirty work.

Ms. MacKinnon deploys the phrase “digital bonapartism” to describe the policy of strong-arm leaders who use the Internet to seek legitimacy, for instance by crowdsourcing input on new laws or using pro-government bloggers to slur out-of-favor officials. Such leaders may not block Internet sites outright, but they may well intimidate or threaten bloggers and Internet journalists * “if they push the envelope too far.” Ms. MacKinnon sees this tendency in Russia and China, although she shows that the Internet in China is more varied and less well policed than is often portrayed.

[*Note that just three months ago, our Department of Homeland Security obtained the right to “monitor” all data that comes from journalists, writers or bloggers. “Previously established guidelines within the administration say that data could only be collected under authorization set forth by written code, but the new provisions in the NOC’s [National Operations Center] write-up means that any reporter, whether someone along the lines of Walter Cronkite or a budding blogger, can be victimized by the agency.” ( http://rt.com/usa/news/homeland-security-journalists-monitoring-321/ ). —SB]

Ms. MacKinnon worries about Internet freedom in Western democracies as well. She cites Sen. Joe Lieberman’s introduction, with Sen. Susan Collins, of a cybersecurity bill in the Senate in 2010 that critics complained would have granted the federal government an emergency Internet “kill switch.” Sen. Lieberman also drew flak in 2010 for allegedly complaining to Amazon.com when a service run by the company was used by WikiLeaks for its online publication of U.S. diplomatic cables. Amazon cut off WikiLeaks, * but the company denied that it was influenced by Sen. Lieberman. Around the same time, PayPal and MasterCard ended relationships with WikiLeaks, and Twitter data related to the group was subpoenaed. Ms. MacKinnon says that the response to WikiLeaks “highlights a troubling murkiness, opacity, and lack of public accountability in the power relationships between government and Internet-related companies.”

[*Whatever one may believe about WikiLeaks, this would be akin to me self-publishing a book through Amazon.com that the government felt was contrary to their partisan ideology. The government then would make their displeasure with me known to Amazon.com, PayPal and MasterCard. Those three private, non-governmental companies would then cut me off. If they can do it to WikiLeaks, they can do it to anyone. —SB]

Consent of the Networked

By Rebecca MacKinnon
(Basic, 294 pages, $26.99)

If governments are the malevolent sovereigns seeking to enclose the digital commons, then big tech companies are sometimes the obedient vassals keeping the peasants in line. Businesses can be roped into doing the censorship work for governments—and supplying states with sophisticated surveillance equipment as well. Internet companies can use our data in ways beyond our control and without our knowledge * and give up that data to prying government agencies. Big tech companies—e.g., Internet service providers or social networks—are what Ms. MacKinnon calls the “stewards and handmaidens” of Internet censorship.

[Recently, Yuri Milner, the CEO of Digital Sky Technologies made public his belief that Facebook will eventually become a “basis for artificial intelligence.” This is due to the fact that “Facebook is the central nexus of social data and the social graph; it is the online personification of personalities, interests, friendships and more.” [ http://mashable.com/2010/11/16/could-facebook-become-the-basis-for-artificial-intelligence/ ] What better way to mimic or create artificial behavior than to monitor the behavior of humans through their online social actions (what we “like,” what we buy, what we listen to or watch or read, our educational levels, how we speak to each other, how open we are, how private we try to be, how radical we are . . . For a concise and readable history of artificial intelligence, see: http://library.thinkquest.org/2705/history.html . —SB]

But what happens when those stewards and handmaidens become sovereigns in their own right, the curators of what news we read, what movies we see and what protests we attend? Ms. MacKinnon is concerned that when closed proprietary systems—such as Facebook or Apple’s App Store—dominate the Web, free speech will suffer. She highlights Apple, which has been criticized for banning apps it finds objectionable, including a cartoon version of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (featuring some nudity) and an app ridiculing public figures. There is a danger, Ms. MacKinnon says, that political activists will become “hostage to the arbitrary whims of corporate self-governance.”

This claim cuts to the heart of the debate about the future of the Internet. Private services like YouTube have every right to choose what content they carry, just as Wal-Mart or an organic knitwear store has every right to be selective about what products it sells. What concerns advocates of the open Web is that tech giants like Facebook or Google are so colossal that they are more like public utilities; when it comes to the freedom of speech and assembly, they function as town squares * instead of privately owned shopping malls.

[* Recent American elections have utilized to great effect the concept of online town halls, where voters from every nook and cranny of the country can listen in and join in, as long as they have an internet connection. Here, it’s a tool to be used to any politician’s benefit. The broader discussion, though, is whether the same politician, once elected, can shut down the town hall discussion if it begins to smell of “those nasty far-right tea partiers,” or likewise, “those nasty far-left socialists,” depending, of course, on what political ideology the winning politician gives allegiance to. —SB]

Ms. MacKinnon says that leaders such as French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has described regulation of the Internet is a moral imperative, “offer a false binary choice between their preferred solutions on the one hand and an anarchic state of nature in cyberspace on the other.” She’s right. The problem is that many thinkers on the information-wants-to-be-free side of the debate present the same binary choice, seeing almost any state control of the Internet, or any government attempt to protect intellectual property, or even the attempts of private social networks to get people to log in with their real names, * as affronts to democracy comparable with the worst excesses of repressive regimes.

[* Here is a great example of the needed balance between privacy and security. On one hand, the idea of logging in with an alias name, address and all other personal info sounds not bad at all. On the other hand, there are more than a handful of characters out there who would love anonymous online access for evil intent. The farther right you go politically, the more liberty you find at the expense of security. The farther left you go, the more control you get at the expense of liberty. A Barack Obama would seek the most governmental control. A Romney, Santorum or Gingrich would seek the most corporate, private-interests control. A Ron Paul would seek the least governmental or corporate control and the most personal liberty. —SB]

Luckily, Ms. MacKinnon’s analysis is more nuanced and balanced than that, and “Consent of the Networked” is an excellent survey of the Internet’s major fault lines. To protect online freedom, she favors grass-roots movements of empowered users pushing back against corporations. She argues that companies must be convinced, through multi-stakeholder efforts like the Global Network Initiative, “that respecting and protecting their users’ universally recognized human rights is in their long-term commercial self-interest.”

Advocating more activism and more pressure on companies might not sound particularly startling, but already such tactics seem to be bearing fruit. A couple of months ago, after pressure from nongovernmental agencies, Western companies stopped building a surveillance system for the Syrian regime *. In the tech industry, the idea of corporate social responsibility is still fairly new. But a look at the successes achieved by the environmental movement shows that pressuring companies and raising consumer awareness make a lot of sense.

* [2.16.2012 UPDATE: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been responsible, under his rule, for the deaths of more than 7,400 of his people. The United Nations (UN), just hours ago, condemned Assad for human rights violations and called for him to step down. And here are “Western companies” having to be pressured to stop “building a surveillance system for the Syrian regime.” Not exactly social responsibility. —SB]

Mr. Allnutt writes about digital topics for the Tangled Web blog of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

[For two recent and outstanding books on the myriad of relevant issues revolving around the internet, see: Brockman, John, ed. Is The Internet Changing The Way You Think?: The Net’s Impact on our Minds andFuture. Harper/Perennial, 2011, and: Levy, Steven. In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives. Simon & Schuster, 2011. For insight into the present and future of artificial intelligence, see: Kurzweil, Ray. The Age Of Spiritual Machines: When Machines Exceed Human Intelligence. 1999. Penguin, 2000. —SB]

Yesterday, I heard a quote on a TV program attibuted to Dr. Hans Selye: “No wind blows in favor of a ship without direction.” Dr. Selye (1907-1982) was an endocrinologist. Endocrinology is a branch of biology that deals with the endocrine system in a general sense and with the body’s hormones more specifically. Selye, honored by many as “the father of stress,” wrote a series of books on the nature of stress that are considered classics to this day, notably The Stress of Life (1956, 1978) and Stress Without Distress(1974).

I searched and searched on the internet for the primary source of the quote and found only scattered uses of the words, blindly, it seemed, with authorship attributed to Selye but with no citation of where or when he authored them. Then, I found a variation of the quote with authorship attributed to the writer Michel de Montaigne, who is honored as “the father of the essay.” The complete essays of Montaigne are required reading in my view. The revered essayist did use the quote, and he properly credited the philosopher Seneca as the author.

So, here were modern writers on the internet using the quote and crediting authorship to Selye without evidence of where or when the good doctor “authored” it. Here was a writer using the quote and crediting authorship to Montaigne, with the classical Montaigne, only, unafraid to credit the first-known author of the quote, Seneca, along with the renowned essayist’s own variation of the quote. Could it be more obvious that the modern writers had not actually taken the time to search for the first-known quote but had picked it based on a kind of “fast-food” convenience, settled on it and then moved on.

The primary source quote within its original context is: “The archer must know what he is seeking to hit; then he must aim and control the weapon by his skill. Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbour he is making for, no wind is the right wind.” [Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales: Volume II. “Epistle LXXI: On The Supreme Good.” ca. 4 B.C. – 65 A.D. Tr. Richard M. Gummere, Ph.D. 1920. Harvard University Press, 1962.]

When Montaigne used the quote, he varied the wording somewhat, but with integrity, he still credited its true author: “It is no wonder, says the ancient [Seneca], that chance has so much power over us, since we live by chance. . . . The archer must first know what he is aiming at, and then set his hand, his bow, his string, his arrow, and his movements for that goal. Our plans go astray because they have no direction and no aim. No wind works for the man who has no port of destination.” [Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Essays of Montaigne. “Book II: 1. Of the inconsistency of our actions.” 1572-74. Tr. Donald M. Frame. Stanford University Press, 1957, 1976.]

If Dr. Hans Selye did, in fact, somewhere and at sometime, say: “No wind blows in favor of a ship without direction,” he was not the author of those words and should not be credited as the author unless also referencing where and when he said it–along with the fact that Seneca was the true author. It’s no crime for Selye to have used the quote, and it’s no crime to quote Selye instead of Seneca. The crime is in implicating Selye or Montaigne as the author of Seneca’s words.

The internet is a tool. Specifically, it’s a roadmap. If I need to drive a nail into wood, I find a hammer–a tool for driving nails. If I need to find information, I use the internet–a roadmap to destinations of fact. On that note, Wikipedia is not a destination of any kind whatsoever. It’s a guidebook of dates, names, places, events, bibliographies, etc. A guidebook is a tool that allows you to move even closer to a primary source.

In the above instance, I wanted to drive from my computer to the city of: “No wind blows in favor of a ship without direction.” If I was lazy, or a cheat, then I could have stopped at the village of Dr. Hans Selye and decided not to drive any further. I could just tell people I traveled to the real city of the quote when I didn’t. Or, I could drive a little further to the town of Montaigne and stop there, telling people that I drove the full distance when I didn’t. Hmmmm, at least I wouldn’t be all the way lazy! Half-a-cheat is better than being a full one, right? If I’m not lazy at all, or a cheat, then I only tell people that I’ve traveled to the primary source of the quote, the city of Seneca, when I actually have traveled there. The destination, in this case, is the quote as taken from the actual text of the Harvard University translation of Seneca, which happens to be online and free to view. One just has to look for it. How difficult is that?

I suspect that there are far fewer cheats than there are lazy writers. But laziness, as the above example shows, equals being a cheat because it’s simply not true that Selye or Montaigne authored the quote. Crediting them with the quote is a lie whether through laziness or being stressed out from the careful process of thorough research.

“No wind blows in favor of a ship without direction.” What exactly does it mean to have no direction, to live by chance? What does it mean to have no favoring wind in your sails? What does it mean to not know what it is you’re aiming at? Seeking out primary sources of information clarifies aim and direction. Settling on what someone else has settled on, probably from someone else who settled on it before, is not a ship with direction and has no favorable wind in its sails. In fact, it shows that the captain–if a captain at all–is truly lost.

An arrow fired with no aim toward a specific target is actually a dangerous thought. It can be stated with a similar quote, from an anonymous Japanese proverb, “Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.” Vision has everything to do with setting your sights on a specific target. Action has everything to do with the skill, integrity and inner-drive of the archer. –SB